 From the Amazon Meeting Center in downtown Seattle, it's theCUBE, covering Imagine a Better World, a global education conference sponsored by Amazon Web Services. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown Seattle at AWS Imagine Education, about 900 people from 20 countries, really coming together for the first ever AWS Summit from Public Sector Group, really focused just on education. We got a little bit of a twist here on our next guest, really coming from more of the artsy side of the house, which is always great to hear from. We've got Linda Drew, she's the vice chancellor, and Andy Cook, the chief operations officer, both from Ravensbourne University in London. Welcome. Yeah, well, we're really pleased to be here, really excited. So for the people that aren't familiar with Ravensbourne, give us a little overview of the school. Okay, we're in the center of London in Greenwich, which is right by the river. We have about 2,500 students, and about 250 faculty. And we specialize in design, media, and technology, and the interaction of all that kind of stuff. Pretty fun space to be right now. Absolutely gorgeous space to be. And there's so much talk about just IT and the tech and IT and operations, but there's so much neat stuff happening really more on the creative side and in the arts, leveraging technology in all different new ways. Absolutely, I mean, it's kind of hand in glove really. All the innovation that's happening is happening with the way that tech is disrupting what's happening in the creative workspace. Right. And vice versa, really. So the two things are affecting each other. And the channels of distribution now being so open. I mean, there's no greater time to be an artist, a creator, because your path to publishing, your path to your audience is really, really short and direct, assuming you can get their attention. Yeah. Absolutely. I think we recognize there's a huge opportunity there for us in terms of developing a competitive advantage in the sector. Right. Using new emerging technologies to forge a new path for the institution and help educate and bridge the skills gap for industry. Right. So what are the things you guys do? One of the classes is broadcast production. That's right, yeah. And we're talking about all of our guys buying the cameras that nobody can see. And that, again, is an evolving space. And you guys, it's kind of an interesting play. At one hand, you're talking about Shakespearean plays. That's right. On the other hand, you're looking at the newest, latest, greatest way to get that out to consumers, to viewers, to schools, while training the people in the middle with the latest and greatest tool. So you guys have started an AWS elemental experiment. I wonder if you can give us a little bit of color on that project. Well, I can start. And I'll tell you about the impact that it has. And Andy might be able to follow up on some of the technical stuff. We've had a project going with the Royal Shakespeare Company in England. And it's one of their education programs, where what we do with is a three-way relationship between them, their plays being shot in Stratford-on-Avon or in London. And one aspect of what happens is that what we do is host a live program that is shot in our TV production studio. And jointly, the recorded program and the live action is streamed to schools, several hundred schools at a time. And some of our recent shows have been reaching upwards of 85,000 school students at a time. 85,000? Absolutely. That is great reach. So we've been using the more traditional technology before. And that was having some issues with school teachers and others that were saying they weren't getting a great service out of the live stream. And our students were a bit frustrated with what they were learning about the streaming technologies. Since having moved to AWS Elemental, that's really increased the satisfaction. Both of what our students are learning, but also what they're delivering in terms of the live streamed program. And because they're streaming more than one thing, because we know that they're also streaming not just the content, but also British Sign Language. So they're also streaming assigned content as well. Right. So Andy, you're on the hook for actually getting these systems up and working, right? Well, I'm not sure about that. But I think Linda said it all. I think the previous stack of technology that we were using in this area were not reliable. We were getting a lot of dropouts with the streams, lots of complaints from our schools. So the shift to Elemental has been transformational. So lots of really complimentary feedback from the schools and they're taking part in this exercise. So it's been really good. Yeah, it's good. I mean, the story over and over with cloud, basically anything, right, is that the amount of scale and resources and expertise and hardware and software that Amazon can bring to bear on your behalf compared to what you can do on your own, it's just not the same. And you're a relatively small school. It's that same scale delta, whether it's a medium-sized company, a big company or multinational. I mean, these guys have that massive scale across so many customers and you get that delivered to your doorstep. As you will know, there's a massive shift taking place in the broadcast industry, away from the sort of towards kind of IP-driven technologies. So we see this as a real opportunity to develop our curriculum, add cloud technologies into our existing courses and kind of go on that journey away from the more traditional technologies to a cloud-based approach. I'm just curious if you've adopted cloud stuff and more your kind of standard IT practices or where are you kind of on that journey? Or was the client satisfaction issue on these broadcasts would kind of maybe accelerated that adoption faster than your normal stuff? I think it's been quite closely related in some way. So I mean, it's a bit kind of chicken and egg. We were already looking at ways of enhancing our infrastructure. This kind of stuff came along at the same time. So we're just saying, how quickly can we get to move to some of this stuff or our standard operational focus? So I think most universities are in some sort of hybrid state running on-premise services with some putting their feet sort of gently into the water of cloud technologies. But I think we're looking at sort of really accelerating that journey towards AWS for our infrastructure stuff. I'm curious, were you here for the keynote this morning? Yeah, definitely. Did you see the Alexa little movie with the kids in the door move? Really exciting. Yeah, very exciting. So I think one of the slides really sums up our journey and thoughts around working with Amazon. And there's the IT sort of transformation piece. Then there's adoption of machine learning in terms of improving the student experience. And then there's adopting sort of cloud courses into our curriculum. So those kind of three areas are really where we're looking to sort of build a relationship with Amazon. It's just interesting to see what defines this new education experience, right? Because the kids have different expectations. They've all grown up with apps and mobile. To your point on the attention, if the sum's not working, they're used to flip into another channel. I switched into another input. So if it doesn't work, you only have their attention for a short period of time. So I think it is really interesting to kind of rethink what are the actual activities that define kind of this new engagement and this new student experience while they're in your institution. And I thought that was a really pretty slick demo. It's a great example, a really good demo. And some of the really exciting things that have come out of us adopting this technology thus far includes some students coming to us with ideas for setting up our very own television channel that we can broadcast on campus using this technology and a way of streaming it to students' phones and tablets so that they've got content about the university and its activities on a regular basis. And the ROI calculation for you to execute that when it's cloud-based is very, very different, right? Absolutely. It's pretty simple. Yeah. Buy a new rack of servers and the whole to-do. All right, well, I'll give you the last word. What are you hoping to get out of these couple days here? What have you seen so far? Any hallway kind of conversations that are really getting your attention? Well, hopefully not just a deeper relationship with AWS, but the traction to help us work towards innovating on creativity and technology into the future. Great. Andy goes, I'm going to go with the chancellor. Smart man. All right. Absolutely. And Andy, thanks again for taking a few minutes and I hope you enjoy the rest of your time here. Thank you. Linda, he's Andy. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at AWS Imagine Education in downtown Seattle. Thanks for watching.